We decided to do it on Raise-a-Reader day to help promote literacy in
our community.
We chose the book Grumpy Bird by Jeremy Tankard because he was the guest author/illustrator at our regional library summer reading program. We offered a few pre-mob activities leading up to the event.
A story time in a local park was a good opportunity to introduce the book to
families who weren’t familiar with it.
We practiced copying Grumpy Bird as we walked around the park.
Also we had a few days where families could attend events to make animal masks. Our local art gallery opened on a Saturday to run a mask making day too.
The day of the event started with building a nest for Grumpy Bird.
We gathered our material in front of the art gallery and twisted grapevines
together to make a circle. Then we used bamboo to fill it in.
The gallery provided some softer material to line the nest making it
comfortable for lots of birds to gather.
Once all our main characters were assembled we started the story.
Bird wakes up grumpy.
Too grumpy to eat, play and even fly so he goes for a walk.
As he walks he passes some of his friends and they decide to walk along with
him.
A young girl, of 8 , painted the above posters to put in business windows. They provided the narration of the story and some advertisement leading up to our
event.
We continued around the city block meeting all the characters in the story
making our mob grow larger.
All the characters followed Grumpy Bird and copied his actions which cheered
Bird until he was happy.
We flew back to the nest to have a snack of worms (gummy, of course).
It was so much fun to share a terrific story with so many people.